Amazon Allowance

[olympus]

I applaud the effort Amazon is making to expand its influence, and giving kids an Amazon allowance would lock them in because it doesn't look too easy to convert that money back to real cash.

But I don't think this one will stick around for very long. Prepaid cash/debit cards and automated deposits are an older and more proven way of doing this (not to mention just handing your kids $20 in cash every week). By giving them something that is accepted everywhere, you teach them how to handle limited amounts of money and how to resist temptations -- if I drop $5 on gas station snacks, I've just burned up a sizeable chunk of my allowance on something that will be gone in 10 minutes. Giving an allowance is great to teach young teenagers how to handle money before they get their own job, but I don't see Amazon breaking into this and locking kids into buying only from Amazon.

[superuser2]

If you give teenagers cash, they can't spend it online. Thanks to KYC rules and bank policies, you have to be 18 to get anything that looks like a credit card.

Best plan for teenagers is a joint checking account (dedicated to the child's use) at your bank, with a debit card they can use for day-to-day spending. You can do allowance, etc with transfers, and most bankd will play ball as long as one person on the account (the parent) is 18.

[allworknoplay]

Kids? I'm pretty sure the real market here is camgirls and other internet personalities that people want to buy presents for.

[efsavage]

Life lessons aside, it's alot harder to spend your $20/week on weed or booze or gambling when it's an Amazon credit.

[valgaze]

This is an interesting payments case b/c with kiddos in the United States you need to deal with the Children's Online Privacy Act (ie the reason for the "are you 13 years or older" checkbox question)

One firm that's was trying to do kid payments was Virtual Piggy (now Oink): http://www.oink.com

[jusben1369]

I wonder if it's solving for my problem where my kids buy a lot of video on demand. I'd like to cap that for each of them each month. It wouldn't hurt if it also was funds they could then use to replace the iPhone charger they break or lose each month.

[AntsInMyEyes]

I think kids away at college, especially for freshman year could be another use case. Parents know they are smart enough they probably could make the right financial choices, but just being a freshman in college means they probably won't.

[pech0rin]

This seems like a great way to give employees a bit of a perk. An allowance could be used for technical books, and or other learning materials.

[sombremesa]

This is Amazon we're talking about. The company that doesn't give employees prime, free hardware to take home, or a real employee discount.

[dc-tech-fan]

I want this for something like Fiverr.

Instead of my kids accumulating more junk, they learn the skills of hiring and delegating.

Don't want to mow the lawn in this heat? Use your allowance to somebody else to do it. As long as the job is done they will earn their allowance.

I just need a way to make sure they're not outsourcing their homework or paying somebody buy them alcohol.

[mentat]

I find this disturbing in a way I can't quite quantify. Kids should do things, not just appear to do things because they're clever about outsourcing to someone worse off.

[hobarrera]

Lesson learnt by kid: Money is all that matter. Never bother with anything else.

[falcolas]

This would be fantastic for use with AWS, give developers a monthly balance to spin up their choice of environments. Could be pretty awesome.

[joshstrange]

Especially since rollover is built in.

[dkhenry]

I like the idea, but I would really like to see a bank or another finical institution offer some services that I can use as a modern introduction to banking for my kids. When I was a kid I had a savings account, and a savings book that I took to the bank to do all my banking. All my deposits and withdrawls were printed into the book by the teller and it was easy enough for me to fill out deposit slips for the checks and cash my family gave me or I earned doing jobs around the neighborhood.

Let my kids have a debit card and let them use ATM's and smart phone apps just like I do, even better if its designed to be useable by children to encourage good banking behaviors.

[gnoway]

AKA the Amazon Reverse Microloan program.

[nmridul]

Simple paypal alternative that is free .... Could not find any fee info, so should be free...

Then this could easily be used for accepting payments for services or sales. Since I anyways spend on amazon, better accept payments this way without any fee...

[DanBlake]

Will be interesting if this can be expanded to workers for office supplies and whatnot.

[adanto6840]

Check out Amazon Business, which appears to allow you to set up multiple users in a hierarchy (including at least some sort of a custom "approvals" system), set thresholds, etc...

http://www.amazon.com/b?node=11261610011

Not sure if it's new or not, recently got a call about getting into it though we declined as we're a small shop & already happy with the level of service we get via Prime.

[jkestner]

How about teaching them about saving? It'd be nice if this was interest-bearing.

[elwell]

Cool idea, I think they might have trouble reaching their target audience though.

[nlake44]

I don't understand how Amazon can afford to maintain so many projects given their revenue is so low (https://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AMZN&annual). Someone care to explain?

[hiddencost]

90 billion is low? Or are you talking about income? They can afford so many projects because they're making an enormous amount of money and shoveling it all back into these projects.

[floridaguy01]

great product landing page. Loads quick and lots of information. Works great on mobile. 10/10